On one of the busiest traveling holidays of the year, drivers may be focusing on getting to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, not on what smart car technologies are saving them in fuel costs. But in the first study to assess the energy impact of smart technology in cars, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have put a number on the potential fuel-cost savings alone: $6.2 billion.

“That’s not insignificant,” said Yeganeh Hayeri, an assistant professor at Stevens whose work lies at the intersection of civil and environmental engineering and public policy. “That translates to between $60 and $266 in the pocket of car owners every year, not to mention additional savings created for each driver due to more smoothly-flowing traffic, fewer accidents and aerodynamic efficiency of all other vehicles on the road.”…

To figure out the impact of these technologies on fuel-saving cost, Hayeri and her colleagues at Stevens, including Saeed Vasebi, a graduate student in Hayeri’s lab, and Carnegie Mellon University conducted a comprehensive review of the literature on the energy and safety impacts of automated features, providing precise data for predicting how these features would affect fuel consumption nationwide.